Simon Michaux: From Resource Warnings to Fringe Beliefs

Simon Michaux’s report on raw material shortages for the energy transition has gone viral — but it’s based on flawed assumptions, outdated data, and a misunderstanding of basic energy principles. Beyond that, Michaux openly promotes pseudoscientific ideas like perpetual motion machines and collaborates with fringe movements. This article analyzes both the scientific errors and the deeper ideological agenda behind his work.

Shockwaves from a Doomsday Claim

It started with a jarring headline and a 1,000-page report from the Geological Survey of Finland. Associate professor Simon Michaux warned that “we don’t have enough materials or minerals on the planet to support a comprehensive global transition to renewable energy technologies”. In blunt terms, Michaux claimed the clean energy transition is impossible. He tallied staggering requirements – for instance, to replace the world’s 46,423 fossil fuel power stations, Michaux argued we’d need to build 586,000 renewable power plants. His conclusions were apocalyptic: civilization would face unavoidable collapse as fossil fuels decline because green tech simply couldn’t be scaled.

But as the dust settled, experts began to push back. A closer look revealed that Michaux’s doomsday analysis was built on flawed assumptions and a worldview tinged more by ideology than rigorous science. What follows is a journey from initial alarm to relief, as researchers and analysts dissected Michaux’s work piece by piece – ultimately debunking the myth that a lack of raw materials will derail the energy transition.

First Cracks in the Story

Around the same time, engineer and science communicator Dave Borlace released a methodical breakdown on his popular YouTube channel “Just Have a Think.” The video, Borlace explained, was dedicated to debunking the now-infamous Michaux report “which purported to prove that there weren’t enough minerals in the world to enable us to get off of fossil fuels”. It was an unusual moment in the climate discourse: a niche technical paper becoming a viral meme, then getting called out by name in an explainer video. Borlace walked viewers through Michaux’s numbers, highlighting contradictions and oversights. In one striking example, he showed that Michaux’s own data undermined his conclusion – if you removed a single extreme assumption (more on that soon), the remaining known mineral reserves were in fact sufficient to electrify global transport.

These early rebuttals set the stage. They suggested that Michaux’s analysis might be a house of cards, impressive in bulk but ready to crumble under scrutiny. To truly understand, I dug into the details and consulted the growing body of critiques from credible analysts. The deeper I looked, the more the narrative flipped: far from delivering a cold dose of realism, Michaux’s report was riddled with errors, false assumptions, and misrepresentations. As CleanTechnica analyst Michael Barnard would later put it, “Michaux makes so many compounding mistakes that it’s remarkable anyone takes him remotely seriously”.

Dismantling the Data: What Michaux Got Wrong

Assuming No Technological Progress

Michaux treated technologies as static – effectively freezing innovation at today’s state of the art. In reality, clean tech is a moving target. Hoekstra and others note that battery chemistry is already diversifying; future stationary storage is unlikely to rely on scarce minerals like nickel or cobalt at all. Michaux ignored emerging alternatives (like sodium-ion, iron-flow batteries, advanced recycling, etc.) and thus wildly overestimated long-term demand for certain materials. As Barnard observed, Michaux’s projections involve “rigid static modeling that defies how markets and supply chains actually work” – essentially a straight-line extrapolation with no room for human ingenuity.

Ignoring Efficiency & Recycling

One of Michaux’s most glaring oversights was downplaying the impact of efficiency gains and recycling in reducing raw material needs. For example, he assumed each new ton of steel or aluminum for clean energy must come from virgin ore. In reality, a huge and growing share comes from recycling – “one-third of global steel is already recycled”, Barnard points out​. Michaux’s model simply **“discounts the role of recycling,” failing to recognize how much scrap metal will be reused instead of mined anew​. Similarly, he assumed no improvement in energy efficiency. This “willful blindness to efficiency gains” inflated his energy and material demand projections far beyond what real-world trends support.

Overstated Battery Requirements

Perhaps the single biggest mistake was Michaux’s treatment of energy storage. He posited that a renewable grid would need an enormous buffer of lithium batteries – so large that it consumed most of the world’s lithium, leaving little for electric vehicles. How large? Michaux misinterpreted one study to claim that Germany alone would require 12 weeks of full backup storage (all battery-powered) to cover renewables’ variability. In fact, the study’s recommendation was 24 days, not 12 weeks, and it assumed a mix of solutions, not just lithium batteries. By concocting a scenario where lithium-ion bears the full burden of grid backup, Michaux arrived at absurd conclusions – like a €3.6 trillion price tag for German batteries that would supply “400 times the country’s actual [electricity] demand”. In reality, grids can be balanced with a portfolio of tools (transmission, demand management, diverse storage types). The world will need orders of magnitude less storage than Michaux assumed, and much of it won’t even use the vulnerable minerals he focused on​.

One-for-One Replacement Fallacy

Michaux’s accounting took today’s fossil-fueled economy and essentially swapped every piece for an equivalent green piece, 1:1. This misses how systems transform. Analysts note that a fully electrified world won’t have the same infrastructure or energy usage patterns. For instance, Michaux calculated materials as if we must replace every kilometer driven by gas cars with an electric car kilometer. But new mobility models (like more mass transit, fewer cars, smarter logistics) can shrink the total vehicle fleet. RethinkX, a futurist think tank, projects an 80% reduction in cars through shared autonomous EVs – Michaux dismissed this, but then paradoxically argued that if it did happen, the remaining EVs would be driven so much their batteries wear out faster. It’s a convoluted stance that fails to imagine any upside: either we have too many cars or too few; Michaux managed to portray both as doom. What he didn’t consider is that entire sectors will disappear in a clean economy – e.g. the colossal fuel supply chain. As Nafeez Ahmed explains, an electrified transport system eliminates the need to extract, ship, and refine billions of barrels of oil and tons of coal, “freeing up vast quantities of metals from the obsolete oil, gas, coal and ICE infrastructure” that can be recycled. Michaux’s models simply never accounted for these system-wide shifts, leading him to double-count demand and ignore huge savings.

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Ideology Over Science: The Worldview Behind Simon Michaux’s “Impossible” Transition

The sheer number of mistakes in Simon Michaux’s analysis raises a question: how did a professional geologist get it so wrong? Part of the answer lies in his worldview, which comes through strongly in his public talks and associations. Far from being a neutral analyst, Michaux often sounds like a man preparing for apocalypse – a perspective that seems to have biased his work toward doom and distrust of any solution.

Designing The Future’s own investigation into Michaux’s background reveals a fascination with conspiracy theories and pseudoscience that is startling for someone advising governments. In internal presentations (later made public), Michaux has declared that “the transition to renewable energy is a big hoax” and that we’re being “led around by a trick” – he claims governments will eventually admit “sorry – there was no plan” after stringing the public along. He speaks of a coming “Great Reset” orchestrated by shadowy elites, warns that global powers intend to collapse fiat currencies and even deliberately depopulate the planet to under 1 billion people. This is hardcore collapse ideology, verging into areas beloved by internet conspiracy forums.

But Michaux doesn’t stop at political conspiracies. He is also promoting his own project — an isolated “research settlement” that he presents as a space for “new science” and preparation for societal collapse. He actively pitches this idea to audiences within esoteric, New Age, degrowth, and pseudoscientific circles, portraying it as a kind of ark — an experimental base for survival and the “restart” of civilization.

It’s a remarkable profile: a senior geologist at a national survey who espouses prepper conspiracies and magical energy theories on the side. This context explains a lot about his doomsday mineral report. Michaux approaches green technology not as an eager problem-solver but as a skeptic bordering on denialist. His analyses consistently assume nothing will improve (“fight or flight” panic mode), and he often proposes absurd alternatives instead of mainstream solutions. In fact, after claiming solar, wind, and batteries can’t work, Michaux’s preferred vision (his “Purple Transition” scenario) involves a Rube Goldberg mix of thorium reactors, synthetic fuels, and hydrogen – an inefficient mashup that one critic described as “the equivalent of someone insisting we build a fleet of steam-powered airships in the middle of the jet age.”. It seems Michaux would rather bet on exotic experiments and even pseudo-technologies than trust the exponential improvements in clean tech already underway.

Crucially, Michaux’s ideological bent aligns with certain groups who have latched onto his work. As Barnard noted, “A bunch of different groups have adopted him as their go-to guy for their particularly perverse view of the world.”​ These include the extreme degrowth advocates who argue the only solution is to intentionally shrink the economy, fossil fuel interests eager to cast doubt on renewables, and even hydrogen economy promoters who use Michaux to claim batteries won’t cut it. Michaux himself has openly advocated for “embracing degrowth”, essentially giving up on the idea of green growth and modern lifestyles. It’s no surprise, then, that his analysis skews negative – it was always geared to conclude “impossible”, fitting a narrative of inevitable collapse and the failure of industrial society. As one detailed rebuttal put it, Michaux’s view is “far from a sober, scientific perspective; this view is itself an ideological reaction” rooted in fear of change​.

The Verdict: Transition Is Challenging But Far From Impossible

The journey from viral doom to factual debunking offers a few clear lessons. First, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence – and Michaux’s claims did not hold up when experts shone light on the details. Once scrutinized, his prediction of global mineral shortages blocking climate action turned out to be exaggerated and misleading. Yes, the sustainable transition will demand a tremendous scale-up in mining and materials processing in the coming decades. Yes, we must plan for bottlenecks, invest in recycling, and continually innovate to use less and reuse more. But nothing in peer-reviewed science or real-world data suggests an insurmountable geological barrier. On the contrary, studies from institutions like the International Energy Agency conclude that known reserves and foreseeable technology will be sufficient to achieve net-zero – with mindful policy and likely substitutions.

Second, we’ve seen how an ideological filter can twist analysis. Michaux’s collapse-oriented mindset led him to cherry-pick assumptions that confirmed his pessimism. The result was not sound science but a kind of anti-renewables pseudoscience, dressed up in technical language. As Barnard quipped, “if you thought bad takes on the energy transition were limited to fossil fuel lobbyists, Michaux is here to prove that pessimism can be just as detached from reality as corporate greenwashing.” In the end, Michaux’s work tells us less about the physical limits of Earth and more about the psychology of doomerism – a reminder that even a associate professor can build a false model of the world if they ignore human adaptability and scientific progress.

In hindsight, the “Michaux scare” of the 2020s will likely serve as a case study in getting the energy transition story wrong. It shocked many, but it also galvanized experts to communicate more clearly about what’s possible. Today, we can say with confidence that global minerals shortages will not derail the energy transformation​. The only thing that can derail it is giving up. And as we’ve seen, those urging us to abandon decarbonization – whether out of profit motive or apocalypse fervor – have a habit of being wrong. Science, innovation, and sensible planning remain firmly on the side of an achievable green future.